There is a row on my bookshelf dedicated to journalism textbooks. At least three of these books delve into the ethics of this field, essentially the moral “do’s and don’t’s” when it comes to reporting, writing and publishing.

“Nightcrawler” is the type of film that leaves those ethics on the shelf.

The story revolves around Louis “Lou” Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), a persistent man who is desperate for work, and is not above lying, thieving and jumping into questionable tasks with no hesitation to get it.

Lou is both a newer kind of anti-hero and a familiar character at the same time. He is someone audience members can look at and immediately connect to someone they have met in their lives. It may be someone they were not particularly fond of and he may be an extreme version, but he is someone recognizable all the same.

He is tenacious and borderline obnoxiously driven to succeed and compete in a work force already filled with this generation’s unemployed college graduates.

Whenever presented with — or desperately trying to create — a job opportunity, he goes through what one can consider talking points he read from a self-help book on communication and delivers his catchphrase: he is a hard-worker, he sets high goals and his motto is, “If you want to win the lottery, you have to make the money to buy the ticket.”

After witnessing two police offers rescue an injured woman from her wrecked car and the independent video camera crew that came to film the scene and then sell the footage to the local news station, Lou’s interest was immediately peaked. He saw an opportunity and took to it with gusto; there was no debate over the ethics in flashing a camera in a dying man’s face and being paid for it.

The audience sees Lou’s progression from clumsily filming shootings with a small handheld camcorder he purchased after pawning a stolen bicycle to hiring an amicable but exploitable assistant named Rick (Riz Ahmed) to boldly altering the scene of a brutal vehicle collision to make the image more marketable (read: profitable).

There are a cast of characters that find themselves caught in Lou’s path: Rick, Nina (Rene Russo), the news producer whose program can use the ratings boost Lou’s footage brings and Joe (Bill Paxton), the competing cameraman who initially dismisses Lou then later tries to hire him after seeing the kind of footage he captures.

Avoiding specific spoilers, two out of three of these characters end up dead or seriously injured by the end of the film while the third — okay, spoiler alert after all — Nina, ends up not only backed into an unwanted sexual arrangement with Lou to keep receiving the shocking footage he produces, but blindly admiring him for what he does, without knowing the full extent of how he does it.

There is a point in the story when Lou, after using his police scanner and his navigator aka Rick, witnesses two men fleeing from a mansion. He goes inside and finds a whole family brutally murdered. He, in turn, films it and offers it the news station for a hefty price.

Nina’s boss, who has feebly objected to Lou’s footage from the beginning, questions if broadcasting the bloody scene of the crime is even ethical or lawful, to which Nina replies with a dismissive order to blur the faces of the victims and put a disclaimer. Her comments essentially mean this is not about morals, it is about gaining viewers and ratings which leads to what they all want: money.

Even at the college level, journalism students are taught to use discrection with sources and what reporters choose to reveal. We are taught to measure if the material we are using benefits society and if this outweighs the negative consequences certain subject matter has.

While there are various types of journalism and each reporter has different reasons for choosing this career path and there are laws that protect the writers, there is often the question of whether or not what we choose to do with certain information is ethical and if it serves a higher purpose than ourselves.

The film leaves an uneasy feeling as the credits roll; it is indeed a well-made, original and engaging film, but the message it leaves about our generation is a disconcerting one. In the end, Lou faced no consequences for his actions.

As the viewers watch Lou give his self-help book spiel one last time, smile and drive off after expanding his business with brand new employees and equipment, an unsettling question comes to mind. Does persistence and greed outweigh morals and drive why we do the things we do? To put it even plainer: at the end of the day, do bad guys win?